Natural error handling in speech recognition

ABSTRACT

A user interface, and associated techniques, that permit a fast and efficient way of correcting speech recognition errors, or of diminishing their impact. The user may correct mistakes in a natural way, essentially by repeating the information that was incorrectly recognized previously. Such a mechanism closely approximates what human-to-human dialogue would be in similar circumstances. Such a system fully takes advantage of all the information provided by the user, and on its own estimates the quality of the recognition in order to determine the correct sequence of words in the fewest number of steps.

CROSS-REFERENCE TO RELATED APPLICATION

This application is a continuation application of U.S. patentapplication Ser. No. 10/210,704 filed on Jul. 31, 2002 now U.S. Pat. No.7,386,454, the contents of which are hereby incorporated by reference inits entirety.

FIELD OF THE INVENTION

The present invention relates generally to speech recognition, and moreparticularly to methods and arrangements for attending to errors inconnection therewith.

BACKGROUND OF THE INVENTION

Automatic speech recognition is used at present for a broad variety oftasks. Some such tasks include: entering text in a computer (e.g.,desktop dictation), performing a transaction or access a database overthe telephone or a speech-enabled communication medium (IVR's),transcribing spoken data interactions for archival and search purposes(e.g. broadcast news, lectures or meetings), and transcribinghuman-to-human speech interactions as a communication aid (e.g. for thehearing impaired).

Conventional speech recognition technology cannot handle those taskswithout error. A larger number of recognition errors may occur, forinstance, when the acoustic environment of the speaker or thecommunication channel is noisy, or when the speech is fast, hesitant orpoorly enunciated. Transcribing some types of information is also moreerror prone, for example, spelling names or addresses or long strings ofdigits.

The efficiency and the success of speech-enabled applications does notonly depend on reducing the number of errors. At least as important ishow these errors are handled and how easily the user can correct them.That has a large impact on the efficiency of the system, the quality ofthe user experience and the general acceptance of such systems.

In view of the foregoing, a need has been recognized in connection withimproving upon the shortcomings and disadvantages presented byconventional arrangements.

SUMMARY OF THE INVENTION

Broadly contemplated in accordance with at least one presently preferredembodiment of the present invention is a user interface, and associatedtechniques, that permit a fast and efficient way of correcting speechrecognition errors, or of diminishing their impact. The user may correctmistakes in a natural way, essentially by repeating the information thatwas incorrectly recognized previously. Such a mechanism closelyapproximates what human-to-human dialogue would be in similarcircumstances. Such a system fully takes advantage of all theinformation provided by the user, and on its own estimates the qualityof the recognition in order to determine the correct sequence of wordsin the fewest number of steps.

In summary, one aspect of the present invention provides an apparatusfor handling errors in speech recognition, said apparatus comprising: aninput arrangement which accepts speech input from a user; the inputarrangement comprising a recognizer which recognizes the speech input; afeedback arrangement which provides feedback of the recognized speechinput to the user; and a correction arrangement which accepts correctiveinformation from the user relating to the occurrence of one or moreerrors in the recognized speech input.

In another aspect, the present invention provides a program storagedevice readable by machine, tangibly embodying a program of instructionsexecutable by the machine to perform method steps for handling errors inspeech recognition, said method comprising the steps of: acceptingspeech input from a user and recognizing the speech input; providingfeedback of the recognized speech input to the user; and acceptingcorrective information from the user relating to the occurrence of oneor more errors in the recognized speech input.

For a better understanding of the present invention, together with otherand further features and advantages thereof, reference is made to thefollowing description, taken in conjunction with the accompanyingdrawings, and the scope of the invention will be pointed out in theappended claims.

BRIEF DESCRIPTION OF THE DRAWINGS

FIG. 1 depicts a variety of components that may be employed inaccordance with one or more systems with which a user may interact.

FIG. 2 is a flow diagram of an error handling process.

FIG. 3 illustrates an example of soft-alignment in error handling.

FIG. 4 illustrates an example of soft-alignment of a subsequence inerror handling.

FIG. 5 illustrates an example of decision in error handling.

FIG. 6 illustrates an example of decision with partial repetition inerror handling.

DESCRIPTION OF THE PREFERRED EMBODIMENTS

Most conventional systems handle recognition errors as follows:

A. the user realizes that a recognition error occurred by examining thefeedback provided by the system (through a visual display or via speechsynthesis);

B. the user signals that an error occurred and optionally gives thelocation of the error; and

C. the system prompts the user to repeat the information that wasincorrectly recognized.

In accordance with at least one presently preferred embodiment of thepresent invention, however, a more flexible and efficient interactionbetween the user and the system in the event of recognition errors ispermitted via:

1. merging the above-listed steps B and C, thus allowing the user tosignal the presence of one or more errors, the location of the error(s),and provide a correction all in one step;

2. allowing the use of context-sensitive natural correction commands(for example by saying “there is no ‘b’ in my name”, or “the last digitis five, not nine”);

3. making the system initiate context-sensitive clarification dialogswhen necessary (for example by asking “is it c as in Charles or d as inDorothy?”);

4. using all the repetitions, or partial repetitions, of the sameinformation given by the user to come up with the best possible answer,instead of solely the latest utterance;

5. using all the repetitions, or partial repetitions, of the sameinformation given by the user to better accomplish the task, even whenthe user does not explicitly request a correction.

Item no. 4 above has been addressed in part by U.S. Pat. No. 5,712,957:“Locating and correcting erroneously recognized portions of utterancesby rescoring based on two N-best lists” (Waibel, A. H. and McNair, A.E.). That patent describes several methods for discovering the locationof the errors and providing a correction. One method requires the use ofa mouse and a display to highlight the subsection containing one or moreerrors. Another technique involves generating a special language modelthat contains the whole substring of the first recognized utterance,allowing the user to utter again the portion that he/she wishes tocorrect, then validating the location of the substring detected by thesystem and, finally, providing a correction by speech or other means(i.e., the user provides the correction by uttering the substring thathas been located in the previous step, or provides the correctedsubstring via some other means, e.g., a keyboard).

By their very nature, these techniques require several steps ofinteraction between the user and the system, even in the most favorablescenarios: (a) to signal the presence of an error, (b) to give thelocation of the error, and (c) to correct the error. In contrast, thetechniques broadly contemplated herein minimize the number of stepsneeded. In the best scenario, the user can signal, locate and correctthe error in one step. As a result, the user can complete his taskfaster and in a more natural way.

Another key benefit of the presently contemplated techniques over thoseof U.S. Pat. No. 5,712,957, may be found in a more powerful correctionmechanism. The methods contemplated in U.S. Pat. No. 5,712,957 tend torequire that the correct words be in the list of N best hypothesesreturned by the recognizer. Even when the repetition of the “errorful”phrase is incorrectly recognized by the system, the techniques broadlycontemplated herein may still be able to find out what the correct wordsare. This is achieved through the use of word confidence scores and aword-by-word merging of the multiple recognition results.

A technique broadly contemplated herein for merging several recognitionhypotheses bears some resemblance to a published technique named ROVER,as disclosed in J. G. Fiscus, “A Post-Processing System to Yield ReducedWord Error Rates: Recognizer Output Voting Error Reduction (ROVER)”(Proc. IEEE Automatic Speech Recognition and Understanding Workshop,Santa Barbara, Calif., 347-352, 1997). ROVER combines all at once theoutput of different speech recognizers working on the same utterance inorder to reduce the number of errors. It uses a fixed number ofrecognizers that process each utterance in its entirety.

Broadly contemplated in accordance with at least one embodiment of thepresent invention, however, is the combining of the output of onerecognizer on multiple utterances, one at a time. The utterances mayonly be partial repetitions of the sequence of words being corrected.Each repetition may deal with a different part of the sequence of words.Unlike ROVER, the correction techniques broadly contemplated hereinrepresent an iterative process where full use is made of each repetitionas soon as it becomes available and the result conditions what the nextaction will be.

As a matter of distinguishing the arrangements and methods broadlycontemplated herein, it should be noted that neither U.S. Pat. No.5,712,957 nor the ROVER arrangement addresses the items 1, 2, 3 and 5listed further above.

The disclosure now turns to a detailed discussion of embodiments of thepresent invention.

The description that follows applies to the spoken interaction between a“user” and a “system” (i.e., any and all machinery and/or associatedcomponents that a user may interact with). The composition of the systemmay vary, as well as the communication means that a user may employ tointeract with a system, as shown in FIG. 1. The system may include asingle computer (10), personal digital assistant (14) or other computingdevice. It may also include several computers connected in a network (12and 16), where each one performs part of the tasks described below.Spoken communications between the user and the system can occur througha microphone associated with a computer 10/12 or personal digitalassistant 14 and loudspeakers (not shown). It can also take placethrough a telephone (landline 18 or wireless 20), in which case one ormore computers in the system will preferably be fitted with telephonyequipment. Additional user-system interaction may also occur through akeyboard, mouse or display. The system, regardless of what is employedtherein, preferably also comprises a speech recognition unit and,preferably, a speech synthesis unit (not shown in FIG. 1).

The system allows the user to perform a task through spoken commands andspoken dialogs, optionally with the help of a keyboard, mouse, displayor other input/output device. The task may be to perform a transaction(e.g. place an order, transfer funds, make a phone call), to retrieveinformation (e.g. check account balances, check flight schedules,retrieve e-mail) from the computer system, to enter information into adatabase (e.g. enter a phone number, dictate a letter or e-mail), or tohave one's words transcribed for others to read (e.g. meeting or lecturetranscription).

During the course of interaction, the system will preferably provide theuser with feedback about the output of the speech recognition unit.Feedback may be provided through speech synthesis or by displaying theresults on a screen. The system may ask for confirmation explicitly orimplicitly. The user may then continue with the task, or correct theprevious information by repeating it or repeating the part of it thathas been incorrectly recognized. Examples are shown immediately below.

Dialog example No. 1 (. . .) System: “what amount do you want totransfer?” User: “two hundred and fifty dollars” System: “two hundredand sixty dollars. Do you wish to proceed?” User: “no, it is two hundredand fifty” System: “two hundred and fifty dollars. Do you wish toproceed?” (. . .) Dialog example No. 2 (. . .) System: “please spell thename now” User: “D O S T O E V S K Y” System: “is D O S D O E V S K Ycorrect?” User: “S T O” System: “is D O S P O E V S K Y correct?” User:“S, T as in Thomas, O” System: “is D O S T O E V S K Y correct?” (. . .)

In example 1 above, the system implicitly asks for confirmation and theuser simply repeats the correct amount. In the second example, thesystem explicitly asks for a confirmation and the user first repeatspart of the information, then chooses to repeat it again in a differentway.

The user may also provide correction commands, for example:

Dialog example No. 3 (. . .) System: “what is the reference code?” User:“one zero X Y three two one” System: “10XY325 cannot be found, pleasecheck the number” User: “the last digit is one” (. . .) Dialog exampleNo. 4 (. . .) System: “Please say the card number” User: “4321 5678 13574680” System: “is 4321 9618 1357 4680 the correct number?” User: “it is567, not 961” (. . .)

In example 3, the user gives the location of the error and thereplacement digit. In example 4, the user repeats both the correctdigits and the incorrect ones as a means to locate the error.

Finally, the system can also ask disambiguation questions (i.e.,explicit clarification questions) if it estimates that it will resolvethe problem in the shortest time.

For example:

Dialog example No. 5 (. . .) System: “please spell your name” User: “F YO D O R” System: “is F Y O T O R correct?” User: “O D O” System: “is itB as in Bravo or D as in Delta?” User: “D as in Delta” System: “is F Y OD O R correct?” (. . .)

In example 5, after the first repetition, the set of possibilities forthe fourth letter has been has been narrowed down to either ‘C’ or ‘D’but neither is significantly more likely than the other. Explicitlyasking the user is the fastest way to resolve the issue. If neitheranswer were correct, the user could still provide an alternate answer.

In all the above examples, it is important to note that the repeatedwords do not merely replace the previous ones. The original utteranceand its repetition(s) or partial repetition(s) are all utilized to comeup with the best possible hypothesis. Hence, even if the repetition isnot recognized correctly, it is still possible for the system to come upwith the correct information. And even if the user needs to repeat orprovide a correction more than once, the likelihood that the systemfinds the correct words increases with every repetition. The techniquesneeded to achieve that are detailed in the next section.

A slightly different scenario arises when the user does not explicitlytry to correct recognition mistakes but still repeats some of thesentences or phrases that he spoke before. This may happen during ameeting or a lecture that is being transcribed by a speech recognitionsystem. The system will automatically detect that a phrase has beenrepeated and use the techniques described below to increase the accuracyof the transcription.

Alternatively, the repetitions may be used not to correct the previousutterance, nor to improve the transcription accuracy, but to make betteruse of the information provided by the user. In copending and commonlyassigned U.S. patent application Ser. No. 09/811,053, filed Mar. 16,2001, of Sara H. Basson, Dimitri Kanevsky, and Benoit Maison andentitled “Hierarchical Transcription and Display of Input Speech,” aspeech recognition system is used as a communication aid for the hearingimpaired. The display shows a mixture words, syllables, phonemes. Thelevel of representation depends of the level of confidence assigned bythe recognition unit to the recognition results. High confidencesegments are displayed as words. Other segments are displayed assyllables if they meet a pre-defined confidence threshold, or asphonetically if the confidence is too low. Such a display is designed tofacilitate the use of speech recognition as a hearing aid when there arerecognition errors. It can be used for example by students in aclassroom, or by the attendees of a meeting. In that setup, it willoften happen that the speaker repeats the same information severaltimes. The system can take advantage of the repetitions to better detectwhich parts should be displayed as words (because they are probablycorrectly recognized) and which parts should be displayed as phonemes(because they are less likely to be correct).

The general process by which a new utterance from a user (100) can beused to correct previous recognition results is illustrated in FIG. 2.The digitized sound (101) is sent to the speech recognition module(102). The speech recognition module preferably produces a list of Nhypotheses (103). Each hypothesis is made up of a sequence of words. Ascore is associated with each word. The recognition unit assigns higherscores to words that are more likely to have been correctly recognized.All the scores are transformed by the score mapping module (104). Theresult is a new list of N hypotheses (105) where the score of each word,comprised between 0 and 1, is the estimated probability that the word iscorrect. The soft alignment module (106) takes as inputs the list of Nhypotheses with word probabilities and the current best hypothesis(107), or the sequence of words with probabilities provided by thedialog and decision module (110). The results of the alignment moduleare given to the dialog and decision module (110). One or more newhypotheses are generated by the dialog and decision module (110). Eachof them has a score. The best one is made the current best hypothesis(107), is output to the user by means of synthesized speech (111) or ona display (112), and is stored on top of the history of best hypotheses(108). The other hypotheses generated by the dialog and decision moduleare stored in the list of unused hypotheses (109) and sorted bydecreasing score. The dialog and decision module may also generatedisambiguation questions that are spoken or displayed to the user (100).

The score mapping module (104) preferably takes as input a recognitionscore and produces as output a number between zero and one. It can bedone via a mathematical function or by looking up a table of values. Thefunction is preferably designed to make the output value an estimate ofthe probability that the word is correct.

The soft alignment module (106) preferably accepts as input twosequences of words, with a probability associated which each word. Itputs words from each sequence in correspondence, as much as possible bypairing up identical words. It is possible that some words may not beassociated with any word of the other sequence. The correspondence mustrespect the ordering of both sequence: if word a1 of sequence 1 isassociated with word a2 of sequence 2 and if word b1 of sequence 1 isassociated with word b2 of sequence 2, then when a1 comes before b1 insequence 1, a2 must come before b2 in sequence 2. The set ofassociations between the words is called an “alignment”. When the twosequences are not identical, i.e., when a perfect match is not possible,the probabilities associated with the words can be used to determine a‘maximum probability’ alignment. The module also preferably outputs thealignment cost, determined as shown below.

FIG. 3 shows an example of alignment, the probabilities associated witheach word being shown in parentheses. The cost of each association, andthe total cost are shown on the third line. Here, the cost is determinedvia the following: ‘T’ in sequence 1 does not match ‘D’ in sequence 2,so the associated cost is their average probability (0.2+0.7)/2=0.45;‘O’ in sequence 1 has no match in sequence 2, so the cost is its ownprobability: 0.7.

The soft alignment module can also find the best match for a smallersequence of words in a larger ones. In that case, the alignment costdoes not include any cost for the words at the beginning and and/or atthe end of the longer sequence that do not match any word in the shortersequence.

FIG. 4 shows an example of the alignment of a shorter sequence. Thefirst two associations and the last one do not incur any cost becausethey occur before the beginning and after the end of the shortersequence respectively. (indeed, though, the mismatch between ‘T’ insequence 1 and ‘D’ in sequence 2 incurs a cost of [0.2+0.7]/2=0.45.)

When the new sequence is aligned with the old sequence, the sites wherea mismatch occur should preferably be the sites where the confidence islower. Using the probabilities to decide alignment will ensure that thedialog and decision module (110) will make ‘repairs’ in the part of theold sequence with the lowest confidence scores. Costs may be computedfrom the word probabilities in a different way (e.g. using geometricaverages or some other mathematical formula) and still achieve the sameeffect.

The dialog and decision module (110) preferably maintains the history ofuser interaction in the form of a current ‘best hypothesis’, a list of‘past best hypotheses’, and a list of ‘unused hypotheses’. Each new userinput, as transcribed by the speech recognition module, is analyzed bythe dialog and decision module and the appropriate processing is done.The new best hypothesis (also called ‘merged hypothesis’ hereafter) isthen presented to the user via speech synthesis, or displayed tohim/her, and the next user reaction is awaited.

The user inputs will preferably be considered as falling into severalcategories:

a) repetitions of the data;

b) partial repetitions of the data;

c) simple commands; and

d) edition commands.

Categories a) and b) are preferably handled in a similar manner. Therepetition of the data to be discovered can be embedded in a largersentence like in example 1 above (“no, it is two hundred and fifty”), orworded differently, like in example 2 above (“T as in Thomas”). In allcases, the new input is preferably transformed to a normalized wording,respectively “2 5 0” and “T” in the examples 1 and 2. The wordprobabilities are preferably carried from the original wording to thenormalized wording. If several words are transformed into one, theirprobabilities are averaged. The new, normalized, utterance is given tothe soft alignment module along with the previous best hypothesis. Analignment between the two word sequences is returned.

The new best hypothesis is preferably constructed as follows. Thealignment can be considered as a sequence of ‘bins’. Each bin cancontain two words (one from each sequence), or only one word from thenew sequence, or only one word from the previous best hypothesis. Foreach ‘bin’ a separate decision is made: either to keep the word from thenew sequence or the word from the previous best hypothesis, or no wordat all. The probabilities associated with the words are used to make theselection. For the bins that contain two words, the one with the highestprobability is selected. A decision score is computed as is thedifference between the probability of the selected word and theprobability of the discarded word. For bins that contain only one word,its probability is compared to the average probabilities of the wordsfrom the other sequence found in the nearest surrounding bins. If theprobability of the word is higher than the average computed from theother sequence, the word is kept. Otherwise that bin does not contributeany word to the new merged sequence. The difference between the winningprobability (or average) and losing probability (or average) is thedecision score. An important exception to this procedure deals withpartial repetitions of the data. In that case, a number of bins at thebeginning of the sequence and/or at the end of the sequence onlycontains words from the previous best hypothesis. Any uninterruptedsequence of bins starting with the first bin, or ending with the lastbin, that only contains words from the previous best hypothesis, isgiven the following special treatment: those bins always output the wordfrom the previous best hypothesis regardless of its probability. Theirdecision score is zero. Finally the output from all bins is collected inthe sequence order to construct a merged hypothesis, (or new candidatebest hypothesis). The total decision score is the total of the decisionsscores of all bins.

FIG. 5 shows a decision example. In the fourth bin, T is replaced by Dwith a score of 0.5. In the fifth bin, O from the first sequence is keptbecause its score (0.7) is higher than the average of the scores of Dand R in the second sequence ((0.7+0.4)/2=0.55). The probabilitiesoutput by bins 1, 2, 3 and 6 (where the words match) is the largest fromeither sequence.

FIG. 6 shows an example of decision when the data has been partiallyrepeated. The first two words from the first sequence (F and Y) arecopied unchanged to the new hypothesis because they occur before thestart of the second sequence. The last word (R) is likewise copied tothe new hypothesis.

Before it can be considered the new best hypothesis, it is preferable tofirst check that it does not already appear in the list of hypothesesalready presented to the user. If it does not appear in the list, it isadded to it and presented to the user as the new latest best guess forconfirmation or further correction.

If it already appears in the list another hypothesis is generated untilone is found that as not been presented to the user before. This is doneas follows.

If the speech recognition module returned more than 1 (i.e. N>1)hypothesis, then the processing described above (soft alignment, thenbin-by-bin decision) is preferably repeated for all N hypotheses. Thefirst one that is found will be the new best hypothesis. The remainingone or ones are added to the list of ‘unused hypotheses’.

Even if the new best hypothesis generated from the top recognitionhypothesis does not already appear in the list of hypotheses alreadypresented to the user, if the speech recognition module returned morethan 1 (i.e. N>1) hypothesis they are all processed as described aboveand the unused N−1 merged hypotheses are added to the list of ‘unusedhypotheses’.

When all recognition hypotheses fail to produced a merged hypothesisnever presented before, the list of ‘unused hypotheses’ is searched byorder of decreasing scores, until one that has not been presented beforeis found. The scores used to rank the hypotheses is the average wordprobability.

If all the above procedure fails, the list of N hypotheses output by thespeech recognition engine is processed again. For each bin, both thedecision that was taken originally (i.e. keeping the word with highestprobability) and the reverse decision are now considered. The reversedecisions are given a negative decisions score. Then a series of mergedhypotheses with decision scores that are lower than the originaldecision score (and possibly negative) are generated, in decreasingscore order. This is done by first reversing only one decision in thebin that yielded the smallest decision score, then by reversing onedecision in the bin with the next smallest scores, etc. A series ofhypotheses that all have a lower score than the original decision isgenerated. The more bin decisions that are reversed, the lower the scoreof the new hypothesis. Many combinations of decision reversals can begenerated that way (exactly 2 to the power N, minus one, where N is thenumber of mismatch bins where a decision had to be taken in the firstplace). The new hypotheses that have the smallest score decrease withrespect to the original are considered first.

Any uninterrupted sequence of bins starting with the first bin, orending with the last bin, that only contains words from the previousbest hypothesis is left unchanged, and is given the same specialtreatment as before. The reverse decisions are not considered for thosebins; they always output the word from the previous best hypothesis.This procedure is repeated until a merged hypothesis that has not beenpresented to the user before is found.

Optionally, a new hypothesis can also be generated by replacing thewords with the lowest scores by words that are often mistaken for themby the recognizer because they sound similar; for example, the words‘nine’ and ‘five’ or the letters ‘b’ ‘d’ ‘t’ and ‘p’. Groups of“confusable” words can be stored in a database. The words of the currentbest hypothesis, starting with the words with lowest scores, can becompared to the database and replaced by other words in their group,until a new hypothesis is found.

In the unlikely event that no new hypothesis can be found by any of theprocedures described above, the user is preferably asked to repeat.

Optionally, the system can ask a disambiguation question to the userinstead of presenting the latest best hypothesis, if several conditionsare met. This is preferably done as follows. The score of the new besthypothesis (denoted by s[0]) is compared to the scores of the list of‘unused hypotheses’ (denoted by s[i], i=1 . . . M), if there are any.The C unused hypotheses that have a score s[i]>s[0]−D, where D is apre-set constant, are marked. If only a small number of them (C=1 orC=2) meet the criterion, each of them is aligned with the besthypothesis using the soft alignment module. If all of them differ fromthe best sequence in only a few distinct positions, then adisambiguation question will be asked to the user. The question willpresent a choice between the C+1 subsequences extracted from the unusedsequences and from the best sequence at the positions where any of themdiffers from the best sequence (so that all subsequences have the samelength). For example, the system might ask the question: “are the firsttwo letters ‘c e’ or ‘d b’?”. The system will attempt to interpret thenext input from the user either as a direct answer to the question (e.g.“the first one”, “neither”, etc.), or as a repetition of that particularsubsequence (“yes, ‘c e’”), or as a repetition of the whole sequence,and process it accordingly.

Examples from above-listed category c) of simple commands are: “it iscorrect”, “the previous one was better”, “start over”, “transfer tooperator”, etc., in various wordings. The first one (‘correct’) signalsthat the correction system has finished its task and that control shouldbe transferred to the general application logic.

The next example will result in the previous best hypothesis beingretrieved from the list and presented again to the user. The third onewill result in all lists of hypotheses being cleared and the originalrecognition result being presented to the user. Commands that are beyondthe scope of the correction system are preferably passed on to thegeneral dialog management system of the application.

Examples from above-listed category c) of edition commands are: “the isonly one t”, “the last digits are ‘58’”, “it is 576, not 961”, “deletethe first word”, etc.

Commands that do not include any data entry, like example 4 above(“delete the first word”) are simply executed, the newly generated wordsequence is added to the list of best hypotheses and is presented to theuser. For other commands, the soft alignment module and the decisionprocedure described herein above will preferably be used in variouscombinations.

For example, the user utterance “the last digits are ‘58’” may beprocessed as follows.

The alignment module will not be used, since the alignment can beinferred from the command. The items ‘5’ and ‘8’ will be associated withthe last two items of the previous hypotheses. Then the usual decisionprocedure will be applied.

For the utterance “it is 576, not 961 ”, the alignment module will beused to find the best match for the sequence ‘5 7 6’ in the previoussequence, but ‘9 6 1’ will be used instead of ‘5 7 6’ for the mergingstep.

Many other types of commands uttered by the user can be processed in asimilar way. Examples of such commands could be, e.g., “remove the lastletter”, “there is no ‘d’”, “the previous one was better”, “start over”,etc.

The correction system described above may also be used in applicationswhere the user does not explicitly provide corrections when recognitionerrors occurs, as mentioned in section heretofore. In this case, whereautomatic correction may be involved, the user's speech is processedcontinuously, and the speech recognition outputs its transcription invariable-length phrases. The phrase boundaries could correspond topauses in the speech but need not be. As each phrase becomes available,the soft alignment module is preferably used to match it to thetranscribed text that was output before, going back a pre-set timeinterval in the past, or a pre-set number of words. If the alignmentmodule finds one or more matches with a low alignment cost (according toa pre-set threshold), then the new sequence and the sequence detected inthe previous text are preferably merged according to the proceduredescribed hereinabove, and the merged sequence is used to ‘repair’ boththe previous sequence and the new phrase. Smaller segments extractedfrom the new phrase are also matched to the previous text, to accountfor the fact that the boundaries of repeated sequence of words may bedifferent from the phrase boundaries imposed by the recognizer.

Another possible refinement of the present invention will now bedescribed. As mentioned above, in U.S. patent application Ser. No.09/811,053, a speech recognition system is used as a communication aidfor the hearing impaired. The display shows a mixture of words,syllables, and phonemes. The level of representation depends of thelevel of confidence assigned by the recognition unit to the recognizedwords. Such a display is designed to facilitate the use of speechrecognition as a hearing aid when there are recognition errors. It willoften happen that the speaker repeats the same information severaltimes. The repetitions can be used to automatically correct the decodedwords, as described hereinabove, but also to better select which wordsto display as words and which ones to display as a sequence of syllablesand/or as a sequence of phones.

A procedure similar to that described hereinabove is used. Each newlyrecognized phrase is matched to previously decoded text. Smaller piecesof the new phrase are also matched. Whenever a match is found (accordingto a pre-set threshold), however, only the confidence scores areupdated, for all the words that match exactly. More precisely, for allthe bins that contain two identical words, the word with lowerconfidence is given the (higher) confidence of the other word. Thisprocedure does not change the decoded words, only the confidence scorethat are associated with some of them. After that, the proceduredescribed in U.S. patent application Ser. No. 09/811,053 is applied anewon the words that have an increased confidence. Some of those that werepreviously displayed as sequences of syllables or sequences of phones(or any other visual indication of the confidence level such as color,font size, etc.) will be switched to a higher level of representation(e.g., word instead of syllables, darker color, etc.). Progressively, asmore speech is being transcribed, and if it contains repetitions, themixed display will adapt and better reflect the true (but unknown)status of the words (correct or incorrect).

It is to be understood that the present invention, in accordance with atleast one presently preferred embodiment, includes an input arrangementwhich accepts speech input from a user, the input arrangement comprisinga recognizer which recognizes the speech input, a feedback arrangementwhich provides feedback of the recognized speech input to the user, anda correction arrangement which accepts corrective information from theuser relating to the occurrence of one or more errors in the recognizedspeech input. Together, these components may be implemented on at leastone general-purpose computer running suitable software programs. Thesemay also be implemented on at least one Integrated Circuit or part of atleast one Integrated Circuit. Thus, it is to be understood that theinvention may be implemented in hardware, software, or a combination ofboth.

If not otherwise stated herein, it is to be assumed that all patents,patent applications, patent publications and other publications(including web-based publications) mentioned and cited herein are herebyfully incorporated by reference herein as if set forth in their entiretyherein.

Although illustrative embodiments of the present invention have beendescribed herein with reference to the accompanying drawings, it is tobe understood that the invention is not limited to those preciseembodiments, and that various other changes and modifications may beaffected therein by one skilled in the art without departing from thescope or spirit of the invention.

1. An apparatus for handling errors in speech recognition, saidapparatus comprising: an input arrangement which accepts speech inputfrom a user; said input arrangement comprising a recognizer whichrecognizes the speech input; a feedback arrangement which providesfeedback of the recognized speech input to the user; and a correctionarrangement which accepts corrective information from the user relatingto the occurrence of one or more errors in the recognized speech input,wherein said correction arrangement is adapted to permit the user tosimultaneously signal with only one input the presence of one or moreerrors and to perform both of: indicating at least one location of theone or more errors, and providing at least one correction to the one ormore errors, without the user separately signaling the presence of oneor more errors.
 2. The apparatus according to claim 1, wherein saidcorrection arrangement is adapted to permit the use of context-sensitivenatural correction commands.
 3. The apparatus according to claim 1,wherein said feedback arrangement is adapted to provide acontext-sensitive clarification dialog, said clarification dialogcomprising explicit or implicit confirmation requests.
 4. The apparatusaccording to claim 3, wherein said explicit confirmation request is adisambiguation question.
 5. The apparatus according to claim 1, whereinsaid correction arrangement is adapted to: accept from the user aplurality of repetitions of corrective information; and use at least aportion of the repetitions of corrective information to arrive at a besthypothesis of corrective information.
 6. The apparatus according toclaim 1, wherein said recognizer is adapted to: produce a list ofhypotheses related to the speech input, each hypothesis comprising asequence of at least one word; and score each word, with higher scoresbeing associated with words that have been more likely to have beencorrectly recognized.
 7. The apparatus according to claim 6, furthercomprising a transforming arrangement which transforms the score of eachword to form a new list of hypotheses, whereby the transformed score ofrepresents the estimated probability that the corresponding word iscorrect.
 8. The apparatus according to claim 7, further comprising acomparing arrangement which compares words from the new list ofhypotheses with a current best hypothesis and determines a new besthypothesis for each word.
 9. The apparatus according to claim 8, whereinsaid comparing arrangement is adapted to compare like words whenpossible.
 10. The apparatus according to claim 9, wherein said feedbackarrangement is further adapted to: provide additional feedback ofrecognized speech input subsequent to said step of accepting correctiveinformation and associating at least one confidence score with suchspeech input; wherein, in providing additional feedback, said feedbackarrangement represents recognized speech input having lower confidencescores in a first manner and represents recognized speech input havinghigher confidence scores in a second manner, the first manner involvinga lower level of representation than the second manner.
 11. A programstorage device readable by machine, tangibly embodying a program ofinstructions executable by the machine to perform method steps forhandling errors in speech recognition, said method comprising the stepsof: accepting speech input from a user and recognizing the speech input;providing feedback of the recognized speech input to the user; andaccepting corrective information from the user relating to theoccurrence of one or more errors in the recognized speech input, whereinsaid step of accepting corrective information comprises permitting theuser to simultaneously signal with only one input the presence of one ormore errors and to perform both of: indicating at least one location ofthe one or more errors, and providing at least one correction to the oneor more errors, without the user separately signaling the presence ofone or more errors.